Brian Tyree Henry moves as if he’s been here before. His character on Atlanta, the Donald Glover–led FX dramedy, is a reservoir of slow-unfolding gestures, resigned shrugs, and hauntingly empty expressions. As Alfred, the despondent cousin of Earn, Glover’s ineffectual protagonist, Henry pays extraordinary attention to physicality. His maneuvers are deliberate: When Alfred finds a tenuous sort of fame as the rapper Paper Boi, you can see how celebrity wears him down. Henry’s investment in the character grants Alfred a gravity that serves as the show’s emotional core.

“I knew that Alfred was the Atlanta part. He is the one that’s born and raised there. Where people could come in and leave, he couldn’t,” Henry said when we spoke in New York City recently. “We all know this dude: We know what kinda Swisher he likes, we all know which grape drink he likes, we know which condiments he doesn’t like, we know what specials he likes, we know what fights he’s gonna watch, we know him. We think we know him, and it causes us to put a judgment on him.”

Henry’s Alfred—whom the 36-year-old actor never refers to as “Paper Boi”—straddles the conflicting worlds that many black men inhabit with fatigued equanimity. He balances career strife, familial expectations, systemic discrimination, and social ostracism. He does so knowing that neither the white music-industry gatekeepers he encounters—nor the majority of the black people around him—have much faith in his ability to succeed. Henry imbues Alfred with a kind of bone-deep weariness that belies the character’s years. The performance is at once unnerving and familiar.

Earlier this year, the actor’s work on the series earned him an Emmy nomination. It also caught the attention of Barry Jenkins, the director of the 2017 Best Picture winner, Moonlight. “It was clear that he was an actor who could basically traverse the entire spectrum of emotions—and that he could [do] it within scenes themselves, not necessarily over the course of a two-hour narrative,” Jenkins told me. “There was just something very deep and vulnerable about Brian’s performance.”

Jenkins’s latest film, an adaptation of James Baldwin’s 1974 novel, If Beale Street Could Talk, features Henry as the character Daniel Carty. As the formerly incarcerated friend of one of Beale Street’s protagonists, Henry is on-screen for less than 15 minutes, but his artful performance anchors the film. And if you pay attention, you’ll notice Henry nearly everywhere now: The Steve McQueen–directed heist film Widows sees him deploying an ominous determination in the role of Jamal Manning, a Chicagoan running for alderman against the legacy politician Jack Mulligan (Colin Farrell). Henry also voices the titular character’s detective father in Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse, lending a warmly authoritative figure to the animated superhero story. In these films, as in Atlanta, his performances tie scenes together: He can be agile and profound, menacing and open, composed and undone. Put more plainly, Brian Tyree Henry has the range.

Henry—and particularly his voice, a warm and solemn instrument—has bolstered several disparate choruses in recent years. He’s sung on Broadway as part of the original cast of The Book of Mormon and in the explosive new HBO series Room 104 (as Arnold, a character who wakes with no memory of the prior evening); invoked Southern colloquialisms on the animated Netflix series BoJack Horseman (he voices two characters in one of Season 5’s most poignant episodes); and debated difficult truths in his Tony-nominated performance as William, an embattled security guard in the Kenneth Lonergan play Lobby Hero.

It isn’t quite accurate to say that the actor is having a moment. No uncanny miracle is behind his rise, just slow, agonizing, all-consuming work. And so he is, in a word, tired—physically, yes, but emotionally as well. After all, his chosen roles don’t leave him when filming ends. Henry told me that he carries them everywhere. “I was just telling somebody, I need to let these characters go. I need to get a storage unit for these motherfuckers,” he said with a quiet laugh. “Because I take ’em home with me and I don’t know how to shake ’em … I don’t ever want them to be forgotten.”

As a young black boy in Fayetteville, North Carolina (and later in Washington, D.C.), Henry never envisioned that acting would be a viable career path. Early on, he noticed the entertainment industry’s lack of attention to the kinds of people whose interiority he knew best. “When I turned my television on, I didn’t see anybody like me. I definitely didn’t see anybody that was telling the stories that I was living in my own way,” he said of his childhood. “It didn’t make sense to me that [acting professionally] would be an option, but that didn’t mean that I couldn’t have fun.” And so he did.

The son of a veteran and an educator, Henry is the youngest of five children. By the time he was born, all his sisters were teenagers. Henry soon discovered his knack for capturing the contours of his family members’ personalities, and acting out stories became both a pastime and an escape. “I started imitating the people I saw around me, the environment I saw around me, because I didn’t know any better. It was a safety, it was fun to tell these stories and go out there and watch how it could change somebody’s day,” he said. “I remember being that kid—you know how at Thanksgiving it’s like, Go ’head, baby, tell that story the way you told it,” he added with a laugh, genially mimicking the tone many a black auntie has taken with her family’s most performance-inclined child.

Being the baby of the family also meant that Henry was often too young to consume the same cultural touchstones that the rest of his household did. The moments when he could catch up to the adults’ knowledge became some of his most formative experiences. “I remember seeing The Color Purple for the first time. I was born in ’82, so it had already been out, people had already received it, drank it, all that. I was just crying the entire time, and I couldn’t understand why it was hitting me that way,” he said.

The Color Purple, with Alice Walker’s intense emotional pulls and Oprah Winfrey’s iconic performance, left Henry feeling both devastated and newly aware of just how much he’d been missing. He recalled questioning his older family members incredulously about the film and realizing that everyone else already knew of its monumental power: “I was like, Oh, y’all already saw Color Purple? You knew that Celie and her gon’ do this, had this patty cakin’, and Mister was gonna do that?!” The effect that the film had—on him, but also on the people around him—resonated with Henry long after that initial viewing.

The actor counts that revelation among his Where were you when … ? moments, those inspirations that crackle in his brain long after the screen has faded to black. “I think that’s part of why I do what I do, because I like being at the front line of watching something unfold that could completely shift the way that people see things in the world,” he said. “And that’s kinda how I feel about Atlanta, that’s how I feel about me being a part of Book of Mormon, that’s how I feel about me working with Steve McQueen. I’ve been able to have that feeling of, I was there when this came together.”

As a student at Morehouse College and then the Yale School of Drama, Henry witnessed—and catalyzed—a number of auspicious pairings that brought black stories to life. During his undergraduate years, he played the lead role in a production of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, the celebrated playwright August Wilson’s story about the lives of newly freed enslaved people. At Yale, Henry met the playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney, who would go on to write In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue, the play on which Moonlight was based. “It was kinda just understood that he was the best person at the drama school at that time. Black or anything. Like, the best,” the Yale College alumna and performer Melay Araya, a friend of mine, said of Henry recently. “But it was him and Tarell who were the standouts, one with acting and one with playwriting.”

More than a decade later, Henry’s work is once again concerned with both the threats that haunt black people and the bonds that hold them together. If Beale Street Could Talk, the Jenkins adaptation of Baldwin’s novel, is grounded in the story of Tish and Fonny’s love, and it traces the anguish the couple endures after Fonny is falsely accused of rape and imprisoned. As Daniel Carty, an old friend of Fonny’s, Henry appears only twice in the film. Still, Carty haunts the tale. “His story could easily be my story someday,” Henry said of his character, who warns Fonny about the horrors of the criminal-justice system after the two run into each other on the street. “Daniels are made every minute.”

In the film, Carty is at once joyful and anguished: He laughs with his whole body, he eats unreservedly, and he projects a vulnerability that impresses upon Fonny the burden of the injustice both men face. In the gutting final moments of the scene the two share, Henry’s performance pulses with the kind of rawness Baldwin’s work held so tenderly. “It takes a special kind of actor to have the impact that Brian had in this film,” Stephan James, who plays Fonny, said in an email. “He captured the feeling of an experience all too familiar for so many young black men in America.”

It is a peculiar weight, the phantom menace of racism. It robs people of their rights while simultaneously insisting that their concerns are unfounded. “This shit is hard,” Henry said when we spoke, clapping on the table to punctuate. “Waking up every day as a black person in this country is hard. It is really hard to do. And sometimes you want to vent. And sometimes you need to know that someone is going to listen.”

Henry, who keeps a copy of Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time in his backpack, spoke with a pained appreciation about discovering the clarity and comfort in Baldwin’s work earlier in life. “I was so grateful,” he said, “but at the same time really saddened by the fact that here we are—I’m an ’80s baby, ’90s kid—and these same trials and tribulations that he was talking about then are still making me angry now. What’s his famous quote? ‘To be black and conscious in this country is to be angry all the time.’”

Daniel Carty is indeed angry, but beneath his righteous indignation lies fear and tremendous pain. For Jenkins, having an actor with Henry’s emotional range play the pivotal character was key to the film’s narrative success. “The scene with Daniel, with Brian Tyree Henry, falls almost exactly at the midpoint of the film,” the Beale Street director told me. “It’s one thing to intellectually describe what might be awaiting Fonny if his fate goes a certain way, but it’s another to have a character just completely embody what that fate could look like.”

Still, the scene Henry shares with James is remarkably warm. Even as the threat of incarceration hovers above them both, the men embrace each other—and Tish. It’s a gorgeous tableau, all the more wrenching for its vacillation between the friends’ affection for one another and a mutual, slow-building terror. “There’s a dichotomy, a duality that we all, especially people of color, have to walk within this world,” Henry said of what he’s learned from his Beale Street character. “And sometimes when you let your guard down for just that minute, it can be to your detriment, but at the same time we should all know what it’s like to let our guard down at least once.”

If Beale Street’s Daniel Carty andAtlanta’s Alfred Miles respond to the onslaught of white supremacy with tormented resignation, then Jamal Manning of Widows is intent on striking back. In the film, Henry channels the political hopeful’s existential fear about the conditions of his life and his community—what Henry sums up as a mentality of, How are we gonna get out of this alive?—with terrifying panache. The role is a rare one for the actor, whose prior characters often sublimated anger, collective or otherwise, into agitated silence.

In one of the film’s most electric scenes, the would-be alderman pays a visit to Veronica Rawlings (Viola Davis), the widow of a con man who disappeared with $2 million of Manning’s campaign money. The starkly lit moment, in which Manning threatens her while gripping her fluffy white dog, is deliciously evil. In his escalating intimidation, Henry matches Davis’s intensity without veering into cartoonish villainy. “It’s all or nothing with Brian,” the film’s director, Steve McQueen, told me. “When you’re up against Viola Davis, you gotta bring your A game, and it was beautiful to look at how these two artists made that scene.”

Henry’s level of dedicated camaraderie on the set of Widows buoyed his fellow actors’ performances. His commitment to his collaborators is indicative of what could be described as Henry’s broader project: contributing to a landscape in which all actors have the freedom—and encouragement—to inhabit their characters as deeply as he does. “He was so prepared, I was as prepared as I could be, and I really felt like the two of us were just dancing,” Colin Farrell, who plays Manning’s political foe, Jack Mulligan, told me. “I don’t think Brian was just concerned with his own idea of how the scene should be.”

“I didn’t get one sniff of actorly self-interest off him,” he added. “For me, the most beautiful experiences to have are experiences where, yes, each actor is serving their character, but they’re serving their character as [part of] a greater whole. And I got that sense from Brian Tyree.”

This sentiment is shared by members of the Atlanta cast. The comedian Robert S. Powell III, who plays the hilariously erratic barber Bibby in the second season’s fifth episode, spoke of Henry’s patient partner work with near-reverence. “That was my first and only time ever acting!” Powell told me. “When I researched and found out that everybody on the set was classically trained and here I am, brand new, I didn’t know what to do. But [Henry] made me feel very comfortable.”

“He knew every comma, every word. He was very, very on it … I didn’t know that the entire episode was going to be about me,” the comedian continued. “And then when I found out it was, I was kinda crammin’. So a lot of the ad libs that I did I had to do ’cause I had no idea what I was supposed to be saying at that time. My unpreparedness forced him to have to ad lib.”

For the actress Zazie Beetz, who plays Van, Earn’s sometime girlfriend and the mother of his child, Henry has been like a big brother throughout the show’s run. “He chooses to be on your team and on your side, sort of like a ride or die,” Beetz told me, recounting a time when the actor let her crash at his place for weeks after her Airbnb booking went horribly awry. “He was just like, We’re together in this.”

Henry’s capacity for empathy was evident during the shooting of the show’s second season, which follows Alfred as he grapples with numerous losses, including the death of his mother. Henry had recently lost his mother as well; while filming, he found himself wondering how to care not just for the people around him, but also for the character and for himself. “Alfred doesn’t have anybody to protect him. Everybody sees that he’s a bigger guy, that yeah, he’s got guns, yeah, he sells weed, so he must be inviting that stuff, right?” he said. “But there’s nobody there to really protect Alfred because everybody thinks he’s okay.”

“I really wanted this season [to] show my confrontation with my mental health and his confrontation [with his], which were one and the same. Because, life happens, right?” he continued. “For Alfred … I wanted him to know that somebody cared.”

The actor is still learning how to show himself that same compassion. It’s been a dizzying year of filming, publicity, and travel. There have been awards shows, premieres, and Broadway runs. The past several months have seen Henry filming five movies: Superintelligence, an action-comedy film with Melissa McCarthy; The Woman in the Window, a thriller also starring Amy Adams and Gary Oldman; The Outside Story, an indie feature about a workaholic editor; Godzilla vs. Kong, a monster film at the nexus of two massive franchises; and a reboot of the 1988 thriller Child’s Play alongside Aubrey Plaza. (Of his chaotic work life, he observed: “We like to torture ourselves as human beings, don’t we?”)

The punishing schedule has helped bring about the notable boost in his profile, but it’s also worn him down. “I haven’t had a chance to sit down and actually give myself praise for what I’ve accomplished and what I’ve done. I always feel like, Well, I still gotta do this, and I still have to get over here, and I still have to do that, which is something that we do all the time, especially people of color,” he noted. “Because you spend a lot of time being told what you can’t do, what you can’t have, how you should present yourself, and then when those moments of actual success come along, you’re already tryna figure out how to top that.”

For now, though, Henry is content to make himself at home in the work, to let the characters he inhabits burrow into him and offer guidance. “It’s given me a place to lay my heart out,” he said of the year’s challenging repertoire. “And not just to lay it out, but to receive things into it as well.”

“If I learned anything about doing If Beale Street Could Talk, it’s like—dammit, joy. Like, show the joy of us. Show the love of us. Show that it is obtainable. Show that we can thrive, show that we can feel something, dammit. Feel something.”

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The former California governor called President Trump’s attacks on the late Arizona senator “absolutely unacceptable.”

Arnold Schwarzenegger and John McCain saw in each other a willingness to buck the Republican Party and became fast friends and political allies. Mindful of McCain’s legacy, the former California governor said on Wednesday that he couldn’t stay silent in the face of President Donald Trump’s recent spate of attacks on the late senator.

He told me that Trump’s swipes at McCain are both disgraceful and destructive. “He was just an unbelievable person,” Schwarzenegger said. “So an attack on him is absolutely unacceptable if he’s alive or dead—but even twice as unacceptable since he passed away a few months ago. It doesn’t make any sense whatsoever to do that. I just think it’s a shame that the president lets himself down to that kind of level. We will be lucky if everyone in Washington followed McCain’s example, because he represented courage.”

A plant virus distributes its genes into eight separate segments that can all reproduce, even if they infect different cells.

It is a truth universally acknowledged among virologists that a single virus, carrying a full set of genes, must be in want of a cell. A virus is just a collection of genes packaged into a capsule. It infiltrates and hijacks a living cell to make extra copies of itself. Those daughter viruses then bust out of their ailing host, and each finds a new cell to infect. Rinse, and repeat. This is how all viruses, from Ebola to influenza, are meant to work.

But Stéphane Blanc and his colleagues at the University of Montpellier have shown that one virus breaks all the rules.

Faba bean necrotic stunt virus, or FBNSV for short, infects legumes, and is spread through the bites of aphids. Its genes are split among eight segments, each of which is packaged into its own capsule. And, as Blanc’s team has now shown, these eight segments can reproduce themselves, even if they infect different cells. FBNSV needs all of its components, but it doesn’t need them in the same place. Indeed, this virus never seems to fully come together. It is always distributed, its existence spread between capsules and split among different host cells.

Two years ago, Desmond Hughes heard so many of his favorite podcasters extolling AirPods, Apple’s tiny, futuristic $170 wireless headphones, that he decided they were worth the splurge. He quickly became a convert.

Hughes is still listening to podcasters talk about their AirPods, but now they’re complaining. The battery can no longer hold a charge, they say, rendering them functionally useless. Apple bloggers agree: “Air Pods are starting to show their age for early adopters,” Zac Hall, an editor at 9to5Mac, wrote in a post in January, detailing how he frequently hears a low-battery warning in his AirPods now. Earlier this month, Apple Insider tested a pair of AirPods purchased in 2016 against a pair from 2018, and found that the older pair died after two hours and 16 minutes. “That’s less than half the stated battery life for a new pair,” writer William Gallagher concluded.

As other social networks wage a very public war against misinformation, it’s thriving on Instagram.

When Alex, now a high-school senior, saw an Instagram account he followed post about something called QAnon back in 2017, he’d never heard of the viral conspiracy theory before. But the post piqued his interest, and he wanted to know more. So he did what your average teenager would do: He followed several accounts related to it on Instagram, searched for information on YouTube, and read up on it on forums.

A year and a half later, Alex, who asked to use a pseudonym, runs his own Gen Z–focused QAnon Instagram account, through which he educates his generation about the secret plot by the “deep state” to take down Donald Trump. “I was just noticing a lack in younger people being interested in QAnon, so I figured I would put it out there that there was at least one young person in the movement,” he told me via Instagram direct message. He hopes to “expose the truth about everything corrupt governments and organizations have lied about.” Among those truths: that certain cosmetics and foods contain aborted fetal cells, that the recent Ethiopian Airlines crash was a hoax, and that the Christchurch, New Zealand mosque shootings were staged.

When the two strangers accosted Chelsea Clinton, she was attending an NYU vigil for the Muslims murdered by a terrorist in Christchurch, New Zealand. “This right here is the result of a massacre stoked by people like you and the words that you put out into the world,” one declared as the other recorded the encounter. “I want you to know that, and I want you to feel that deep down inside. Forty-nine people died because of the rhetoric you put out there.”

The accuser’s blend of callous indignation and extravagant nonsense brought to mind charges that Chelsea’s parents murdered Vince Foster or that her mother committed treason when the U.S. consulate in Benghazi was attacked. But these critics weren’t right-wingers parroting talk radio. They were leftist NYU students.

Just because some people allegedly cheated the system doesn’t mean the system is defensible.

Like most other college presidents, R. Gerald Turner, the head of Southern Methodist University, where my son is a student, sends correspondence only when something goes terribly wrong. When I received a mass email from his office this week, I assumed the school had gotten caught up in the fallout of Operation Varsity Blues, the college-admissions cheating and bribery scandal that came to light last week.

But Turner’s missive turned out to be preemptive instead of apologetic. The scandal offered SMU “an opportunity to add to the ongoing review of our process,” he wrote. The university, he explained, must rely on the accuracy of materials submitted by students, including SAT scores. Turner announced that the university intended to review the records of any students associated with “The Key,” the college-counseling firm run by William Singer, the alleged fixer who is accused of paying bribes, facilitating cheats, and creating fraudulent materials to help wealthy parents get their kids into elite schools such as Stanford, Yale, and the University of Southern California.

Donald Cline must have thought no one would ever know. Then DNA testing came along.

Updated at 5:23 p.m. ET on March 18, 2019.

The first Facebookmessage arrived when Heather Woock was packing for vacation, in August 2017. It was from a stranger claiming to be her half sibling. She assumed the message was some kind of scam; her parents had never told her she might have siblings. But the message contained one detail that spooked her. The sender mentioned a doctor, Donald Cline. Woock knew that name; her mother had gone to Cline for fertility treatments before she was born. Had this person somehow gotten her mother’s medical history?

Her mom said not to worry. So Woock, who is 33 and lives just outside Indianapolis, flew to the West Coast for her vacation. She got a couple more messages from other supposed half siblings while she was away. Their persistence was strange. But then her phone broke, and she spent the next week and a half outdoors in Seattle and Vancouver, blissfully disconnected.

“Floods and hurricanes happen. The hazard itself is not the disaster—it’s our habits, our building codes.”

Historic flooding in the Missouri River and Mississippi River basins has ravaged much of the Midwest in recent days. Nebraska and Iowa bore the brunt of the devastation, but rivers in six states at more than 40 locations have reached record levels. The swollen rivers have made short work of the levees that surround them, blasting through or over the tops of 200 miles of earthen barriers in four states. At least three people have died, and hundreds of homes and structures have been destroyed. The Nebraska Farm Bureau estimates farm and ranch losses up to $1 billion in that state alone.

Should we call this a natural disaster?

Labels matter, even—perhaps especially—in times of emergency. Calling the midwestern carnage a natural disaster neatly absolves us of responsibility, and casts us as hapless victims of an unpredictable and vengeful Mother Nature. Far better to draw a distinction between natural hazards and human-induced disasters. According to Craig Fugate, a former administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, “Floods and hurricanes happen. The hazard itself is not the disaster—it’s our habits, our building codes. It’s how we build and live in those areas—that’s the disaster.” This is not a call for blame, but a call to arms to learn from the past to keep ourselves out of harm’s way.

They rely on murderous insincerity and the unwillingness of liberal societies to see them for what they are.

The coward who gunned down 49 Muslim worshippers in New Zealand left behind a white-nationalist screed rationalizing his mass murder as a necessary act to preserve the white race.

The manifesto is striking for its trolling—its combination of fanaticism, insincerity, and attempts at irony. The killer was particularly obsessed with the idea of “white genocide,” a term that does not actually refer to mass murder, ethnic cleansing, or even violence, but to the loss of political and cultural hegemony in countries that white supremacists think should belong to white people by law. The theory of white population decline is innumerate nonsense; as The New Yorker’s Jelani Cobb writes, the conspiracy is a kind of projection, a paranoia that the past genocide, colonialism, and ethnic cleansing forced on the West’s former subjects will be visited upon it.

The camera flies high above the palm trees of Hollywood, soaring north and west, all the way to the suburb of Simi Valley, where it slows down to seek out a certain street, and then slows some more until it finds a particular house. It hovers above it, and then swoops down, pushing in all the way to the doorstep, where it rests, impatient. It is the house where James Safechuck, one of the two men at the center of Leaving Neverland, an HBO documentary, grew up, but in a way it might as well be the Darlings’ house: “Peter Pan chose this particular house because there were people here who believed in him.”

But the Safechucks are not the only people who believe, because here is another suburban house, and here again is that seeking, searching intelligence, the camera pushing closer and closer. It is the house in Brisbane, Australia, where the other subject of the documentary, Wade Robson, grew up. The implication is clear: Michael Jackson could have any little boy in the world; all he needed were parents who would serve up their sons to him.